Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The first couple of nights after the thing with Khalid she had not dreamed of it at all, at least that she could remember. But yesterday during the interminable truck ride, she had found herself remembering the moment of those shards being driven into his face by her hands, and the blood, or something, that had been on her fingers after. This night Khalid did come back to her in her dreams, and she devoted some effort to fighting him off. Not physically fighting him but half-consciously trying to erect some kind of psychic defense against ever seeing his image again, sensing that if he appeared in her thoughts during the day and her dreams at night, he would never be gone, she would still be dreaming of him and reliving the moments in the back of that jet in the unlikely event that she lived to the age of ninety.

She was hearing a kind of snuffling, coughing noise and thought that maybe she had begun crying in her sleep and was hearing her own sobs in the disembodied way that sometimes happened around the foggy frontier between sleeping and waking. Something was grabbing her ankle. The chain, of course. Pulling on it urgently. Really it was just her pulling against it as she rolled around in her sleep. But in the dream it was a man pulling on her wrist. Remarkable that, in a dream, a wrist could substitute for an ankle. But she was seeing the face of an old man who had been with them in the caves in Eritrea and who had walked with them on the long barefoot trek to Sudan. The caves were, among other things, a field hospital for casualties from the war against Ethiopia. Young fighters showed up with burns, gunshot wounds, shrapnel. The doctors tried to fix them up. Some of them died. Some of them could not be fixed—they underwent amputations, and hung around until they could find some place to go. But there was this older guy—in retrospect, probably not older than fifty—with a hollow, sucked-in face carpeted with a patchy gray beard, and urgent, avid green-brown eyes, who showed up there, apparently healthy, and never left. They came to understand, in time, that he was a psychological casualty. Any grown-up could see in a few moments that he was not right in the head. Children didn’t have that instinct. The man had things he very much wanted to say, and he seemed to learn, after a time, that adults would veer away from him, pretend not to hear him, even shoo him away. But children unaccompanied by adults—as they quite often were—could give him a few moments’ company, the social balm that all humans, even crazy old war veterans, had to have. His way of getting you to pay attention to him was to grab you by the wrist and tug until you were obliged to look into his crazy eyes.

After which, he didn’t have a lot to say, since he appeared to have suffered a head injury and could not really form words. But he could gesture at things and look you in the eyes and try to get you to understand. And to the extent that young Zula could follow his train of thought at all, he seemed to be trying to warn her, and any other kid whose wrist he was able to grab, about something. Something really big and bad and scary that was out there in the world beyond this valley where they had found refuge in the caves. In this particular dream he was trying to warn her about Khalid and she was trying to explain that she was pretty sure Khalid was dead, but he wouldn’t believe her, wouldn’t let go of her wrist, just kept yanking. The snuffling and coughing: her crying? But she wasn’t crying; the sounds were coming from somewhere else.

The old man insistent. Like she really just weren’t getting it. Had no idea. Needed to wake up.

She was obliged, in fact, to wake up by a crashing noise and a thud, not far away, that traveled through the ground and came up through her ribs.

A few moments’ ridiculous confusion here as her mind, like a passenger caught straddling the gap between a pier and a departing boat, tried to bridge the dream with reality.

Then she was very awake; the Eritrean man was gone and instantly forgotten.

She wanted to call out “Hello?” but her throat had spasmed shut. If it was Jones and his crew, there was no reason to call out to them; they knew where she was and she certainly felt no need to exchange pleasantries with their like. But whatever was out there did not move—did not think —like a human.

It was at least as big as a human, though.

It was circling this strange thicket that had appeared in its hunting grounds, sniffing at it, probing it with swipes of its paws. Discovering that it came apart rather easily.

It was a bear—it could be nothing else—and it was homing in on the back of the truck, where Zula was.

WHEN SHE HAD made the move from Iowa to Seattle, driving a cute little miniature U-Haul loaded with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other things she couldn’t be without, Zula had made a small diversion into northern Idaho to look in on her uncle Jacob and his family: wife Elizabeth, eldest son Aaron, and two other sons whose names she had, embarrassingly, forgotten. She had been warned by most of the family to expect serious weirdness, but she was assured by Uncle Richard that they were perfectly normal people. What she’d found, of course, was somewhere in between; or perhaps those aspects of their life that seemed normal only made the weird stuff seem weirder. Elizabeth going about her housewifely chores and homeschooling the boys with a Glock semiautomatic lodged in a black shoulder holster strapped over the bodice of her ankle-length dress. Or were those culottes?

Anyway, conversing over dinner, they had somehow gotten onto the topic of bears. Uncle Richard had warned Zula, once, that bears were the conversational equivalent of a black hole, in the sense that any conversation that fell into that topic could never escape it. Considering how rare bears and bear attacks were in the real world, Zula, the rational-skeptic college kid, had doubted the veracity of Dodge’s observation. Maybe it just happened to him a lot, she had reasoned, because he had this one bear incident in his past that people never got tired of hearing about. But then she had seen it happen a couple of times, around tables in dormitory cafeterias: nineteen-year-old kids who had never seen bears in their lives somehow straying onto that topic and then sticking with it until everyone got up and left.

Uncle Jacob had been out building log cabins all day and had sawdust in his beard. He was tired and distracted by his energetic boys, who wanted all of his attention, and he looked like he wanted a cold beer: an indulgence forbidden by his variant of Christianity. So it had taken a while for him to slip into avuncular mode with Zula. She had almost begun to wonder whether he didn’t accept her as a real family member. But it slowly became evident over the course of the meal that he was just hungry. So eventually it turned into a real conversation.

The cabin was built three stories high on a small foundation. The cellar was a food storage area giving way to a subterranean bunker that Jake had dug out by hand and lined with reinforced concrete. The ground floor was practical stuff: sort of a garage/workshop with corners dedicated to such practical matters as slaughtering, butchering, canning, and ammo reloading. The floor above that was one big kitchen/living/dining space and the top story was bedrooms. Both the second and third floors had sliding doors and windows giving way to screened-in decks on what Zula thought of as the back side of the house, since it faced away from the driveway; but she soon learned that Jake and Elizabeth thought of it as the front. It looked out over an area of flat ground extending across a couple of acres, sparsely populated by trees, which lapped up against the base of a steep rise, the southern approach of Abandon Mountain. A mountain stream, Prohibition Crick, tumbled down that slope and ran past the cabin, making a beautiful sound, on its way to a beaver pond about half a mile away. Like-minded neighbors had built homesteads around that, forming a sparse community of five families and a couple of dozen souls distributed across two square miles of flattish, semiarable land at the head of a river valley that ran almost all the way to Bourne’s Ford.